Globalizing
technologies is one of the issues that played a role and for example served
to intensify relations among Anglo-Americans and indigenous populations.
The 1820s and 1830s witnessed the economies and technological transformations
that historians have coined the "market economy" and "Industrial Revolution,"
respectively. The right to compete for advancement in the marketplace became
the touchstone of American “freedom" during this period. The 1994 Rwandan
genocide finally changed the way in which we think genocide occurs
because it encompassed hatreds that rested on colonial resentments, revenge
massacres since 1962, assassinations of political elites, gender and reproduction,
and mystifications. The latter also had in common with the Nazi Genocide
that a leading motive was a conspiracy theory.

The stigmatization
of the involvement in the French Revolution of the common people - has
endured throughout most of the past two hundred years. Those who stood
out against this trend tended to do so, during the nineteenth century,
by idealising popular action into that of `the People' viewed at a comfortably
abstract distance, and during the twentieth century by adopting a Marxist
vocabulary and perspective that in its own way was just as idealising.
This focused on the supposedly progressive stance of certain groups, and
the importance of perceptibly modern social classes such as wage-earners
and property-owning peasants, rather than artisans, sharecroppers or migrant
labourers. In immediate political terms, however, the French Revolution
was a failure. A decade of conflict, both external and internecine, ended
with a lapse into military dictatorship that prolonged the external war
through another fifteen years, before returning the throne to the brother
of the man who had held it in 1789. Internal and external struggles across
that whole generation cost Europe well over a million casualties.

However not
only the French Revolution, but colonial encounters as we further will
see, up to WWI and the Nazi Holocaust, exemplified how artificial classifications
between groups of people, even if their preexisting similarities are clearly
more dominant, may be "naturalized" through the use of propaganda. And,
as globalizing technologies allow for easier and rapid transmission of
misinformation, these "naturalized" perceptions of the "other" group
produce and/or intensify political, social, and economic cleavages which
carry the potential for genocide.

In the wake
of Michel Foucault, numerous historians have analyzed the process by which,
in the course of the nineteenth century, the "punitive festival"of execution
before the French Revolution replaced by the Guillotine, came also the
secret executions, out of sight of the public, and by the rise of the prison
as a place of confinement, a laboratory for developing "techniques for
the coercion of individuals" unknown up until then." The principle of confinement
was now forced upon Western societies. Alongside the introduction of modern
prisons came the creation of institutions of forced labor for "lazy vagabonds,"
the poor, the marginal, and prostitutes-and, at the time of the Industrial
Revolution, even for children. During the first half of the nineteenth
century Great Britain built a vast network of "workhouses" in which hundreds
of thousands of people were interned.

Other changes
were also introduced at this time. Barracks, no longer the preserve of
an aristocratic military elite, were adapted to the needs of modern armies,
the armies of the democratic age, the full power of which had been demonstrated
by the mass levying of troops of 1793. Factories, around which new towns
were built, sprang up with impressive speed. These prisons, barracks, and
factories were all dominated by the same principle of enclosure, the same
imposition of discipline upon time and bodies, the same rational division
and mechanization of labor, a social hierarchy, and the same submission
of bodies to machines. Each of these institutions testified to the degradation
of work and bodies that was an inherent feature of capitalism. The entire
existence of the Nazi concentration camps in fact was also marked by a
constant tension between work and extermination.

Nineteenth century
Europe was truly convinced that it was accomplishing a civilizing mission
in Asia and Africa. At the time of decolonization, the imperialist culture
was stigmatized, violently rejected, and subsequently forgotten; it never
became the subject of in-depth analysis, and today remains still largely
repressed. Yet the intelligibility of the twentieth century would be considerably
enhanced if that amnesia lifted, for then the link between National Socialism
and classic imperialism would no longer be obscured as it is at present.
To several analysts of the thirties and forties, however, it was certainly
perfectly clear. Ernst Junger was reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
as a Wehrmacht officer in Paris in 1942. Contemporary events conferred
a definite topicality upon this tale about the colonization of the Congo,
which described "the switch from a civilizing optimism to total bestiality."
In his diary, Junger noted that the story's hero had "recognized the strains
of the overture to our century."

Also bureaucracy
played a crucial, role in the genocide of the Jews of Europe. The extermination
process relied on the bureaucracy as its essential organ of transmission
and execution. The wissenschaftliche Soldaten or "soldiers of science,"
as the Third Reich dubbed statisticians, neither conceived nor were responsible
for Nazi policy, but they were its instru¬ment.64 It was the bureaucracy
that organized the application of the Nuremberg Laws, the census of the
Jews and the partial Jews, the expropriation of Jewish property within
the framework of measures for the "Aryanization" of the economy, the herding
of Jews into ghettos and their subsequent deportation, the management of
the concentration camps and the killing centers. This bureaucratic apparatus
played an essential role in the implementation of Nazi crimes without ever
calling into question the charismatic radicalization of the regime . The
mechanism of Nazi decision making underwent major changes during the war,
moving from the passing of laws (Nuremberg, 1935) to the issuing of written
but not published directives and finally to giving oral orders (for
setting the gas chambers in operation). But even when it had abandoned
the practice of legal formalization, Nazism still needed a modern, efficient,
and rational bureaucracy. Once the killing centers were in operation, following
the wave of massacres that had accompanied the blitzkrieg in the East,
this army of executives welded to their desks became the heart of the system
for destroying the Jews. The propaganda and publicity for the first anti-Semitic
measures taken against the Jews (the autos-646, the Nuremberg Laws, the
Aryanization of the economy, and the pogroms of the Kristallnacht) were
replaced by the coded language of the operations of extermination, which
was strictly based on administrative jargon, according to which the murder
was referred to as the Final Solution (Endlosung), the executions were
"special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung), and the gas chambers were "special
installations" (Spezialeinrichtungen). The bureaucracy was the instrument
of Nazi violence, and that instrument was an authentic product of what
must be called the civilizing process (an expression borrowed from Norbert
Elias but with conclusions diametrically opposed to his), which included
such features as the sociogenesis of the state, administrative rationalization,
state monopoly over the means of coercion and violence, and drive controls.
That is why Adorno regarded Nazism as the expression of a barbarity "written
into the very principle of civilization.

The string of
developments that connect Nazism, two centuries later, to the modern prison
promoted by Bentham's "Panopticon" and to the guillotine first used during
the French Revolution can now be seen in a different light. Nazi violence
integrated and developed the paradigms that underlie those two institutions
of Western modernity.

In Principles
of Political Economy, Mill stressed that the West Indies were not countries
in the Western sense of the term, but "the place where England finds it
convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee, and a few other
tropical commodities."Alexis de Tocqueville, who certainly saluted the
aristocratic "pride" of the Indian tribes of America and deplored their
massacre, nevertheless declared that they "occupied" that continent but
did not "possess" it. They lived amid the riches of the New World like
temporary residents, as if Providence had afforded them no more than a
"short-term use" of it. Tocqueville went on to say that they were simply
there "waiting" to be replaced by the Europeans, the legitimate proprietors
of the land.' In his correspondence he suggested that the westward expansion
of the United States was a model for the colonization of Algeria,' where
"total domination" was the natural goal of the French armies, in comparison
to which the destruction of villages and the massacre of their Arab populations
were merely "regrettable necessities."

In The Origins
of Totalitarianism, a work published in 1951 but containing several texts
written during the war years, Hannah Arendt identified European imperialism
as an essential stage in the genesis of Nazism. The episodes of nineteenth
century colonial violence seemed to her to prefigure the crimes that were
perpetrated a century later against Europeans, particularly the Jews, who
were the victims of a genocide conceived as an operation of racial purging.
In part 2 of her book, titled "Imperialism," she described the nineteenth-century
policies of colonial domination as the first synthesis between massacre
and administration, a synthesis of which, in her view, the Nazi camps produced
the ultimate form. Modern racism (justified in the name of science) and
bureaucracy (the most perfect embodiment of Western rationality) originated
separately but evolved along parallel lines. They came together in Africa.
The conquest of this continent, achieved with modern weaponry and planned
by the military and civilian bureaucracy, revealed a hitherto unprecedented
potential for violence.

When the European
mob discovered what a "lovely virtue" a white skin could be in Africa,
when the English conqueror in India became an administrator who no longer
believed in the universal validity of law, but was convinced of his own
innate capacity to rule and dominate, ... the stage seemed to be set for
all possible horrors. Lying under anybody's nose were many of the elements
which, gathered together, could create a totalitarian government on the
basis of racism. "Administrative massacres" were proposed by Indian bureaucrats,
while African officials declared that "no ethical considerations such as
the rights of man will be allowed to stand in the way" of the white rule.

The notion of
"living space" was not a Nazi invention. It was simply the German version
of a commonplace of European culture at the time of imperialism, in the
same way as Malthusianism was in Great Britain. The idea of a "living space"
inspired a policy of conquest and was invoked to justify the goals of pan-Germanism.
Meanwhile, Malthusian theories were regularly used to legitimate famine
in India-which some observers of the time accepted as "a salutary cure
for overpopulation."" The concept of "living space," as much as the "population
principle," postulated a hierarchy in the right to existence, which became
the prerogative of the nations, or even "races," that were dominant. The
_expression "Lebensraum" was coined in 1901, under Kaiser Wilhelm, by the
German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and had become part of the
vocabulary of German nationalism well before the advent of Nazism. It resulted
from the fusion of social Darwinism and imperialist geopolitics, and stemmed
from a vision of the extra-European world as a space to be colonized by
biologically superior groups. For Ratzel, the "living space" was essential
in order to reestablish a balance, in Germany, between the industrial development,
which was by now irreversible, and agriculture, which was thereby threatened.
In their colonies, the Germans would reestablish harmonious relations with
nature and preserve their vocation as a people wedded to the land." Under
the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm, the idea of Lebensraum inspired a current
of pan-Germanism and was the basis for a widespread demand for a Weltpolitik,
international policy, that would assign Germany an international position
comparable to that of France and Great Britain. The expectation that this
would be brought about by a policy of colonial expansion in the East, in
a world populated by Untermenschen, was taken for granted by many nationalist
Germans as early as the end of the nineteenth century, when the notions
of Mittelafrika (central Africa) and Mitteleuropa (central Europe) started
to be associated as two indissociable aspects of German foreign policy.
The symptoms of a vision of the world such as this, which attributed "a
civilizing mission" in eastern Europe to the Germans, are easily detectable
in the work not only of Heinrich von Treitschke but also of the young Max
Weber.

The Altdeutscher
Verbund (Pan-German League), founded in 1893, was the central dispenser
of propaganda for this colonial project. By the end of the nineteenth century,
several of its representatives had elaborated plans for a Germanization
of the Slavic world, which in some cases implied marginalizing, in others
expelling "non-Germanic" populations. Some of these plans-for example those
elaborated in the geographer Paul Langhans's Ein Pangermanistisches Deutschland
(1905)were linked to legal measures of racist if not eugenic inspiration
(prohibiting mixed marriages, enforcing sterilization) that paved the way
for the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. During World War I, all the necessary conditions
for beginning toapply these pan-German programs seemed to be in place.

In the early
twenties, the volkisch writer Hans Grimm produced a novel titled Volk ohne
Raum (A People Without Space), which popularized the idea of "living space"
and was extremely successful. In his novel, Grimm, who would join the German
National Socialist Workers Party in 1930, recounted the tale of Freibott,
a German who had traveled to German West Africa and who, having helped
to repress a native revolt, remade his life far from all industrialized
towns, in contact with a still uncontaminated nature that was a replacement
for the German forests that were already surrounded by factory chimneys
and criss-crossed by motorways. Needless to say, the corollary to this
Germanic paradise in South-West Africa was the strictest racial segregation.
In 1920, the last German governor in Africa, Heinrich Schnee, organized
the production of an ambitious Deutsches Koloniallexicon (German Colonial
Lexicon) in three volumes, to which he contributed an article entitled
"Verkafferung" ("Kaffirization"), meaning "the regression of Europeans
to the cultural level of a native" ("kaffir" being a disparaging term for
a black African). In order to prevent such degeneration as a result of
life in the bush, contact with colored peoples, and, above all, sexual
relations with the indigenous population-which would inevitably lead to
diminished intelligence and lower productivity-Schnee advocated a regime
of racial segregation.

The Nuremberg
Laws of the Nazis shocked the Europe of the 1930’s because they were
directed edge the right of the White American to destroy the red man but
perhaps give him credit for having acted as the instrument of Providence
in carrying out and promoting the law of destruction" (note "red man" in
lowercase letters and "White American" in upper case) . Bendyshe then added
some general remarks relating to the American experience: "Some morbid
philanthropists, who have formed associations for the preservation of these
races, attribute their extinction to the aggression by fire and sword inflicted
upon them by the settlers, and the deadly diseases that the latter introduce.
Although to some extent this may be the case, it simply confirms the effects
of a more powerful law that dictates the inferior race will eventually
be swallowed up by the superior."" Alfred Russel Wallace, along with Darwin
the founder of the idea of natural selection, also contributed to the debate.
He reaffirmed the same law of "the preservation of favoured races in the
struggle for life," the inevitable consequence of which is "the extinction
of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans
come into contact." 27 As he saw it, this law explained the disappearance
of the Indians in North America and Brazil and of the Tasmanians, Maoris,
and other indigenous populations in Australia and New Zealand. He went
on to produce a biological justification of imperialism:

Wallace was
to develop his ideas on the extinction of inferior races in a chapter of
his Natural Selection (1870), in which he even predicted the conclusion
of the process in a distant but foreseeable future, when "the world is
again in¬habited by a single, nearly homogeneous race."'

The British
anthropologist Benjamin Kidd declared in Social Evolution, one of the most
widely diffused late-nineteenth century summaries of social Darwinism,
that it was utterly pointless for the white man to demonstrate his philanthropic
virtues and his Christian ethics, since it was despite himself, thanks
to an anthropological and historical law as inevitable as it was pitiless,
that he was causing the end of the "savage peoples": "Whenever a superior
race comes into close contact and competition with an inferior race, the
result seems to be much the same," whether reached "by the rude methods
of wars and conquest (or] the subtle, though no less efficient, methods
with which science makes us acquainted."So no purpose was served by attempts
to elucidate the causes of "the extinction" (machine guns or diseases).
Needless to say, the discourse of the British naturalists was matched by
their colleagues in France, where social Darwinism exerted considerable
influence on the development of anthropology. In 1888, Edmond Perrier wrote:

Human races
owe their spread on earth to their superiority. Just as animals disappear
before the advance of man, this privileged being, so too the savage is
wiped out before the European, before civilization ever takes hold of him.
However regrettable this may be from a moral point of view, civilization
seems to have spread throughout the world far more by dint of destroying
the barbarians than by subjecting them to its laws."

It was Tasmania,
the smallest of the Australian islands, that, toward the end of the nineteenth
century, focused the fantasies of the imperialist culture. Edifying proof
of this is provided by a book called The Last of the Tasmanians, in which
James Bonwick, a sort of Bartolomeo de Las Casas of the Victorian age,
recorded the various versions of the apology for genocide purveyed by the
colonial press and literature of the time.The demographic decline of populations
brought about by the arrival of the colonists, with all their unknown viruses
and infections (smallpox, measles, malaria, venereal diseases) the effect
of which was to propagate epidemics and cause sterility, was inevitably
interpreted by Western observers as confirmation of selectionist theories.
An abundant literature in the main European languages set about introducing
scientific categories for codifying the law of "the fatal impact" of civilization
upon "savages." It was without doubt a "demographic law" that M. Marestang
was attempting to prove in the Revue scientifzque in 1892: "All inferior
peoples put in contact with a superior people are fatally condemned to
perish." In I909, E. Caillot was writing along the same lines in a work
entitled Les Polynesiens orientaux au contact de la civilisation:

When a people
has remained stationary for so long, all hope of seeing it advance must
be abandoned. It is bound to be classified among the inferior nations and,
like these, is condemned to die out or be absorbed by a superior race....
That is the implacable law of nature against which nothing can prevail,
as has repeatedly been established by history: the stronger devours the
weaker. The Polynesian race did not manage to scale the rungs of the ladder
of progress, it has added not the slightest contribution to the efforts
that humanity has made to improve its lot.

The writings
of Darwin are not altogether free of Eurocentric features of this kind,
and there can be no doubt that, right from the first, Origins of Species
(1859) was regarded as the decisive scientific justification for imperialistic
practices. It is now generally accepted that Darwin cannot be considered
responsible for social Darwinism because of the affiliation that its representatives
claim, using terms that are in many cases exaggerated or even distorting.
However, to postulate a total separation between the two would be equally
false. Despite its rejection of polygenicist theories of the origin of
the species, the Darwinian view of the extra-European world was, as Andre
Pichot puts it, a singular, basically very Victorian mixture of "the morality
of the catechism" and "an utterly soulless colonialist racism.

Darwin always
shared his own age's dominant view of "inferior races," which were regarded
as "living fossils," vestiges of a past destined to disappear as civilization
progressed. In his "Notebook E" we find a passage dated December 1838 that
would not have been out of place in Mein Kampf "When two races of men meet,
they act precisely like two species of animals-they fight, eat each other,
bring diseases to each other, but then comes the most deadly struggle,
namely which have the best fitted organization, or instincts (ie. intellect,
in man) to gain the day. The following year, he noted in his diary "a mysterious
factor: wherever the European settles, death seems to persecute the aborigine.""
This is a reference to a Western stereotype that Darwin did not invent
but that he did not manage to avoid and that recurs constantly in those
of his works that preceded the elaboration of his theory of natural selection.
The theory, however, then enabled him to convert that "mysterious factor"
to which he had alluded in 1839 into a veritable scientific law. In The
Descent of Man (1871), he described the death of the natives of the British
colonies as the inevitable consequence of the impact of civilization, which
he took to be confirmation of his theory of natural selection. In short,
he had no hesitation in applying the latter to a social phenomenon, thereby
introducing a biologization of history and sanctioning the popularization
of social Darwinism. Darwin meditated upon "the struggle between civilized
nations and barbarian peoples," comparing the extinction of the "savage
races" to that of the fossil horse, which the Spanish horse replaced in
South America. His argument continues as follows: "The New Zealander seems
conscious of this parallelism, for he compares his future fate with that
of the native rat, now almost exterminated by the European rat.

In a note
in which he quotes the naturalist Poepping, he describes "the breath of
civilization as poisonous to savages." A few years after the publication
of The Descent of Man, the Austrian social Darwinist Ludwig Gumplowicz,
for whom politics was simply an "applied science," abandoned the metaphors
of his master and explained more precisely how it was that civilization
revealed itself to be "poison" to "savages." He reminded the reader that
the Boers considered "the men of the jungle and the Hottentots" to be "creatures"
(Geschopfe) that it was permissible to exterminate as game (die man wie
das Wild des Waldes ausrotten darf ).

At the turn
of the century, social Darwinism, eugenics, and theories of natural selection
were to flourish particularly vigorously in America, where they were used
to justify the genocide of the Indians and the rise of the United States
as a major power on the international stage. In 1893 the historian Frederick
Jackson Turner delivered his famous lecture on the significance of the
frontier in American history. In it, he used the frontier, the source of
two essential principles of the American nation, democracy and individualism,
as a metaphor for progress, "the meeting point between savagery sented
the limes or boundary of pi ward it wiped out backward in wild man must
cease to exist. Tij cist J. K. Hosmer interpreted the to the rank of a
major power as c mission of the Anglo-Saxon cultu English language, and
English principle features of the political, the human race."

One of the most
enthusiastic and convinced partisans of social Darwinism and white supremacy
was the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who in The
Winning of the West wrote that he considered the Anglo-Saxons to be a branch
of the Nordic race and interpreted the conquest of the American West as
a prolongation of the expansion of the Germanic tribes, celebrating it
as "the crowning achievement of this powerful history of racial development."
46 In the wake of Francis Galton and his work Hereditary Genius, Madison
Grant proceeded to move beyond social Darwinism and adopt a biologi¬cal
determinism in which "natural selection" was to be replaced by an "artificial
selection" of races. According to Grant, the destruction of the Indians
had pointed the way, by showing that an effective policy for the elimination
of the weak, those unsuited to civilization, and "degenerates" would eventually
make it possible to "clear out the undesirables who fill our prisons, hospitals,
and psychiatric asylums."

But in nineteenth-century
Western imaginary representations, it was Africa that became the favorite
screen for the projection of colonial fantasies. Africa was a continent
conquered but still strange and mysterious, totally exotic, the exploration
of which was felt to be and was represented as a descent into meeting point
between savagery and civilization.

J. K. Hosmer
interpreted the accession of the United States to the rank of a major power
as confirmation of the civilizing mission of the Anglo-Saxon culture: "English
institutions, the English language, and English thought should become the
principle features of the political, social, and intellectual life of the
human race." His colleague Josiah Strong announced a new era, that of "a
final competition between the races," the natural consequence of which
would be American hegemony." One of the most enthusiastic and convinced
partisans of social Darwinism and white supremacy was the president of
the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who in The Winning of the West wrote
that he considered the Anglo-Saxons to be a branch of the Nordic race and
interpreted the conquest of the American West as a prolongation of the
expansion of the Germanic tribes, celebrating it as "the crowning achievement
of this powerful history of racial development."

In the wake
of Francis Galton and his work Hereditary Genius, Madison Grant proceeded
to move beyond social Darwinism and adopt a biological determinism in which
"natural selection" was to be replaced by an "artificial selection" of
races. According to Grant, the destruction of the Indians had pointed the
way, by showing that an effective policy for the elimination of the weak,
those unsuited to civilization, and "degenerates" would eventually make
it possible to "clear out the undesirables who fill our prisons, hospitals,
and psychiatric asylum.

But in nineteenth-century
Western imaginary representations, it was Africa that became the favorite
screen for the projection of colonial fantasies. Africa was a continent
conquered but still strange and mysterious, totally exotic, the exploration
of which was felt to be and was represented as a descent into "the darkness
of the earliest times." As such it attracted the attention of writers,
scholars, missionaries, adventurers ... It provided an ideal mirror for
the world that the West had "invented": a continent that, unlike India-which
polarized the attention of a European culture obsessed by the Aryan myth
was quite naturally perceived as the refuge of primitive and savage humanity.
The place attributed to the Africans in the racial typology established
by Paul Broca, the founder of the Societe Anthropologique de Paris, is
by now well known." But it will perhaps be helpful to record the view expressed
in the works of the British anthropologist William Winwood Reade, an explorer
and great traveler now remembered for his lengthy correspondence with Darwin,
for whom he provided extensive material for The Descent of Man.

In 1863, Reade
published Savage Africa, a long account of his travels brimming with geographical
and ethnological data, descriptions of tropical forests and vast lakes,
and also careful observations on local mores, rounded off by a chapter
devoted to the "redemption" of this continent. After declaring that, faced
with populations lacking both written language and any kind of culture,
slavery was "a necessity,"Reade predicted the future that awaited the conti¬nent,
following a long period of French and British colonization." Under the
rule of these colonial powers, the Africans would transform their continent
into a kind of garden, building towns in the depths of the forests and
irrigating the deserts. After completing their task of inoculating this
"elixir vitae into the veins of their mother" and restoring her "immortal
beauty," the Africans would be able to depart from the historical stage.
Reade's conclusion ran as follows: "In this amiable task they may possibly
become exterminated. We must learn to look on this result with composure.
It illustrates the beneficent law of nature, that the weak must be devoured
by the strong." Reade described this extermination in typically British
understated and sober terms, which in his final pages even took on bucolic
and nostalgic overtones. His book ends with a touching portrait that is
worth recording: young girls seated on the banks of the Niger, described
as a river as romantic as the Rhine, tearfully read a story entitled "The
Last of the Negroes."

This huge debate
on "the extinction of inferior races," which were described sometimes as
"declining," sometimes as "dying," and were inevitably condemned to make
way for Western civilization, continued throughout the second half of the
nineteenth century. Analyzed retrospectively, it emerges as an extraordinarily
rich arsenal of racial stereotypes-formulated in the language of science,
morality, and the philosophy of history-that was part of the culture of
imperialist and colonialist Europe. Far more than that, though, it illustrates
the attempts to rationalize and provide ideological legitimation for a
vast project of conquest and genocide." Far from being the terrain of scholarly
debates, concepts such as these deeply pervaded the political language
of the period. In 1898, the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, divided
the world into two categories, "living nations and dying nations,"
and two years later Kaiser Wilhelm II delivered a passionate speech in
which he urged the German soldiers sent to China to repress the Boxer revolt
to exterminate the Boxers with all the violence shown by the Huns led by
Attila. Such discourse, unimaginable in relation to a European nation,
reflected the practices commonly pursued by all the colonial powers.

In 1904 the
repression of a revolt by the Hereros in what is now Namibia assumed the
aspect of a veritable genocide. General von Trotha, the chief officer in
command of the operation, proudly claimed responsibility for issuing an
"annihilation order" (Vernichtungsbefehl) that became famous. The German
authorities decided to take no prisoners among the combatants and to do
nothing for the remaining women and children. These were simply moved away
and abandoned in the desert. The Herero population, which in 1904 had numbered
about 80,000 people, had been reduced to fewer than 20,000 one year later.
Similar methods were employed to put down the Hottentot revolt and resulted
in halving the population, from 20,000 to 10,000.

In the
course of the following years, General von Trotha was to declare in several
articles that the extermination of the Hereros had been a "racial war"
(Rassenkampf) waged against peoples "in decline" (untergehende Volker)
or even "dying" (sterbende). He explained that in this struggle, the Darwinian
law of "the survival of the fittest" proved to be a more pertinent guide
than international law." In the debates that took place in the Reichstag
(German parliament) at the time, the Nationalists loudly voiced their approval
of the annihilation of the "savages" and "beasts" revolting in Africa against
colonial rule, while the Socialists, though anxious to avoid mixed marriages
in the colonies, stigmatized such episodes of violence, which reduced the
German imperial army to "a level of bestiality worthy of its victims."
Those debates prove that notions such as "racial warfare," "extermination,"
and "subhumanity" were widespread in Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm as a
result of colonial policies.

The Nazi war
against the USSR illustrates the historical links between the Hitlerian
weltanschauung and the European colonialism of the nineteenth century.
The German blitzkrieg of 1941 condensed all the aims of the Nazis, among
which the desire to eliminate the USSR and Communism was indissociable
from the acquisition of Lebensraum, a "living space" for Germany in eastern
Europe. The Nazi General Plan Ost (General Plan for the East), developed
cooperatively by several research centers using the services of numerous
geographers, economists, demographers, and specialists in the "racial sciences,"
envisaged the German colonization of the territories extending all the
way from Leningrad to the Crimea. A few alterations were made to this plan
after the beginning of the blitzkrieg against the USSR and before the collapse
of the Wehrmacht in 1943, but its major objectives remained clearly defined.
The first stage involved evacuating-through the deportment or elimination
of about 30 million to 40 million "racially undesiable" (rassisch unerwunscht)
Slavs; over the next thirty or so years, about 10 million Germans and ethnic
Germans (Volksdeutsche, Deutsclistdmmige) were gradually to be installed,
to colonize the conquered territories and rule over the Slavs, who would
be reduced to slavery (Heloten). The extermination of "races" judged to
be harmful, such as the Jews and the Gypsies, was part of the overall plan
and was to be completed during the conflict." In November I94I, during
the German offensive against the USSR, Goring, in the course of conversations
with the Italian minister of foreign affairs, Galeazzo Ciano, said that
he foresaw that 30 million Soviet citizens would be affected by famine
in the course of the following year.

The non-European
space was only semi-civilized and the object of conquest by Europeans
became empires, thanks to their colonies and its laws.

Industrialization
encouraged the spread of European settlers throughout the globe and especially
the conquest of Africa, wherein the mission to civilize through progress
presupposed its other, the primitive, dark-skinned savage whose bleak future
Darwinism and eugenics foreordained. The extinction of inferior races,
as much the result of administrative rationality as spontaneity, received
its justification in the view that the savages would soon depart the earth
as a matter of course, unable to adapt to a superior civilization and undeserving
of normative ethical considerations. The belief that expansion would alleviate
overpopulation, a crucial element in empire building, was not unique to
Nazism. Moreover, imperialism introduced another ingredient to the Western
exercise of power, conquest, ethnic cleansing, and extermination as the
route to regeneration.

Finally, the
mass conscripted armies of proletarianized soldiers, interventionist economies,
and anonymous death of World War I derived from industrial and disciplinary
techniques already in place and from imperialist practices: total war,
that is, the elimination of the distinction between combatant and civilian,
the racialized demonization of the enemy, concentration camps, and genocide.
Yet the consequences of the war, particularly the Bolshevik Revolution,
crystallized into the moment when Nazism came to the fore. In addition
to creating a climate that spawned a recognizably fascist philosophy of
death in which warfare and extermination became ends in themselves, the
war's aftermath witnessed a populist counter-revolution, most powerfully
expressed in Nazism, which co-mingled anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, radical
nationalism, and imperial expansion.

However one
should stress the uniqueness of Nazism even as he analyzes its Western
roots (for this see our article series “Hitler’s Protocols”), one
could indeed ad that Nazi Lebensraum took inspiration from British
imperialism and the brutality of white settlers against Native Americans.
Or as Traverso recently argued in “The Origins of Nazi Violence”(2002/2003),
imperialism was the real model for Nazi violence, not Bolshevism. The fusion
of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism that followed World War I occurred
with special vigor in Germany, which, to a degree not previously seen,
biologized both.

Despite the
prevalence of anti-Jewish hatred in the West, only the Nazis joined the
crusading spirit of Christian anti-Judaism with a biologically extreme
anti-Semitism to produce mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Unlike
previous colonial racism, the Nazi regime did not see the Jew as too primitive
to avoid extinction, but rather as the enemy of civilization that it had
to actively eradicate with every available technological, bureaucratic,
and military means.

The Nazi regime
sought not merely to conquer territories but to Germanize them in a synthesized
version of nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and imperialism, all
of which existed elsewhere in Europe but never entered into such a toxic
combination.

So rather than
understand Nazism as simply an _expression of modern bureaucratic and scientific
rationality, the bond between anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism highlights
the moment at which a centuries-old hatred became genocidal.

Traverso however
is not successful in explaining why fascism at its most virulently racist
emerged in Germany rather than elsewhere, something we have done in “Hitler’s
Protocols”.

Eugenics, Traverso
notes, fell on especially fertile soil in Germany, yet his insistence that
eugenics was a Western preoccupation as well begs some elaboration as to
how Germany came to occupy a class by itself. If class racism helps to
explain the historical pedigree of Jewish Bolshevism, why then did the
Third Reich seek to redeem workers but destroy the Jews? Why did the Nazi
regime pursue Lebensraum in the east first, rather than the recovery and
expansion of its overseas empire when the German imperial imagination,
which incorporated both Lebensraum and Weltpolitik, set Germany apart from
other European imperialist powers? Why, finally, did National Socialism
synthesize the worst aspects of Western civilizations while other nations
did not?

How in
fact Globalisation trends facilitated the construction of differences
within societics (highlichted further in our next series “Revenge of
History”. For example the first Genocidal Regime apart from the expulsion
of the Jews from Spain, provides the study of Portugal' s 16th century
colonial experience which covered the vastness of Europe, Africa, Asia,
and South America.

Calculating
the exact number of victims that were ultimately brutalized andlor killed
during the Portuguese conquistas is an obstacle that is impossible to accurately
resolve. Highlighting the global and genocidal trends facilitates future
studies on globalization and genocide and reminds us of the impending dangers
of globalization ron amuck.

What the Native
American Genocide concerns, the U.S. expansion westward indeed intensified
after the development of globalizing technologies in the 1800. These globalizing
technologies added to the U.S. canal system (Steamboat), railway
system (Locomotive). and, eventually, the telegraph line system (tele graph)
which helped generate the movement of people and ideas westward.

These globalizing
technologies not only decreased time, shipping costs, and increased contact,
but also rearranged human relations and accelerated the move towards a
more industriaIized society. The removal of indigenous populations westward
was a result of these globaIizing technologies as U.S. expansion necessitated
. Thus, as indigenous populations were splintered, the U:S. was strengthening
its position as a nation-state.

GlobaIizing
technologies served to intensify relations among Anglo-Americans and indigenous
populations. The 1820s and 1830s witnessed the economie and technological
transformations that historians have coined the "market economy" and "Industrial
Revolution," respectively. The right to compete for advancement in the
marketplace became the touchstone of Ameriean “freedom" during this period.

Thus, along
with the "destination discourse" that had been developing since 'first'
colonial contact and intensified during President Jackson's administration,
globalizing technologies helped to solidify the makings of an American
regime which was born of competition, difference, and expansionist determination
within the North American continent.

The massacres
against indigenous populations coincided with these changes as these technological
advancements were interpreted by Anglo-Americans, specifically the northern
middle-class, as a mark of a movement that had been sparked by divinity.

These industrial
changes thus had the effect of 'branding' a society informally and formally
with shared cultural and commercial symbols which marked it clearly and
distinguished it from others" This proved dangerous for groups in the D.S.,
namely the indigenous and African populations, who did not have access
to these globalizing technologies to circulate their concerns about the
horrors inflicted upon them. Thus, by monopolizing and manipulating these
globalizing technologies, President Jackson, John L. Sullivan, and other
writers of propaganda were able to mobilize Anglo-Americans by framing
the indigenous and African populations as obstacles to progress.

Thus industrial
change, colonial policies of expansion and conquest, and religious and
economic zeal, resulted in genocide in North America. The conditions of
indigenous populations was largely ignored since their idea of freedom...
which centered on preserving their cultural and political autonomy and
retaining control of ancestral lands, was incompatible with that of western
settlers, for whom freedom entailed the right to expand across the continent
and establish farms, ranches, and mines on land that Indians considered
their own.

The global and
genocidal nexus in the making of the D.S. demonstrates the similarities
between the genocidal activities of the Portuguese in Asia, and South America
and the colonists and political officials of the North American continent.
Activities of expansion have followed trends that were set by the Portuguese
expeditions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although the places
of 'first contact' were dissimilar.

Surprisingly,
earlier historians mentioned a "well-meant program" of the U.S.,
yet this doesn’t explain official campaigns to destroy

The 1994 Rwandan
genocide finally changed the way in which we think genocide occurs
because it encompassed hatreds that rested on colonial resentments, revenge
massacres since 1962, assassinations of political elites, gender and reproduction,
and mystifications.

The 1994 Rwandan
genocide did not only lead to 800,000+ deaths, but shattered the future
of Rwanda as a nation-state that is able to compete in the global market
system.

According to
the CIA 2003 World Factbook, the genocide decimated Rwanda's fragile
economic base, severely impoverished the population, particularly women,
and eroded the country's ability to attract private and extern al investment.

However
the 1994 Rwandan genocide was largely caused by the colonization
of Rwanda by Gerrnany (1885-1918) and Belgium (1918-1962). The genocidal
trends culminated with the Rwandan were intensified by the Belgian colonial
administration and the Roman Catholic missionaries called "White Fathers"
after 1918.

But the “White
Fathers” and the administration swiftly concluded, on flimsy evidence,
that Tutsis and Hutus were of completely separate ethnic origin and that
Tutsis were the Hutus' natural masters.

The consequence
of the establishment of differences between Hutus, Tutsis, and Twas by
German and Belgian colonists was not coincidental and is essential to understanding
the historical cleavages that existed between the ethnic groups. That gIobalizing
technologies were present and intensified the atrocities committed against
Tutsis and Hutu moderates before and during the Rwandan genocide of 1994,
specifically after Radio Television Libre de Mille Collines (RTLM) deepened
its messages of hatred towards Tutsis soon after Presidents Habyarimana
and Ntaryamira were assassinated, shows that Rwanda must be carefully guarded
as it is possible that genocidal massacres could swiftly resume. That is,
ethnic mistrust and fear has been reinforced by memories f the genocide,
border raids, assassination of witnesses in trials, the return of Tutsi
and Hutu refugees from neighboring countries, false charges of genocide
stemming from competition for and, and the unrepresentative character of
the government, termed an 'ethnocracy' by some.

While preventing
genocide may seem impossible, what can be deduced from this discussion
is that the convergence of global and genocidal processes in a technologically
advanced world, where information and awareness should be readily available,
has been slow in producing policies that would be successful

In fact now,
at the start of the 21 th century genocide's effects in relation to globalization
should also examine the similar socio-historical foundations that terrorism
shares with genocide.